Telchar, I don't think you drew the right conclusion from that article. The point was that most RPGs, computer or tabletop, focus on mechanics other than role playing to their detriment. According to the author, D&D is not an RPG, while Skyrim is. At least that's my takeaway. Why do is it prima...

Telchar, I don't think you drew the right conclusion from that article. The point was that most RPGs, computer or tabletop, focus on mechanics other than role playing to their detriment. According to the author, D&D is not an RPG, while Skyrim is. At least that's my takeaway. Why do is it prima...

To take this in perhaps a different direction with similar people: John Wick, a game designer that I consider exceptional at his profession and that's about it, has recently written an article that I hate about this very subject but as it relates to tabletop roleplaying. The TLDR Version: Nothing yo...

You do that and the hospitals will encourage people to show up for every booboo just so they can say they treated twice as many people as they actually needed to. Which is bad why? There's a clinic in Montana for government employees only that charges nothing for routine care, basically anything yo...

We should just let it spread. It would solve the jobs problem, and the survivors would be mostly people with natural resistances, improving the gene pool. We should just let junkies share needles. It's solve our jobs problems and addiction predisposition is genetic anyway, so +1 public health. Oh, ...

Onslaught fetches are back. Will reduce the price on all fetch lands. I wouldn't buy the blues for more than 10 dollars, and the others for a few less. Don't buy into the sealed product hype as they will keep printing this product for more than a year.

The objection, the thing that makes the Brooks column go from "stating the obvious" to "economic Calvinist jackassery" is the assumption that lack of self-control causes poverty and, conversely, that poor people are to blame for their fate because they lack self control. Hundred...

Did you know that although the poverty rate hovers around 12-13%, fewer than 4% of those are still under the poverty line 36 months later. link Impermanent poverty is much more prevalent than the chronic, generational poverty. There are definitely ways to change the mental models of people in genera...

Before people talk about character in poverty you really need to distinguish between short term poverty and generational poverty, because those two things are vastly different in terms of what works and what needs to be done. I would highly recommend Bridges out of Poverty .Understanding why people ...

And yet, Hamas is going out of its way to target civilians. And yet your heuristic is still flawed because you identified Israel and Palestine as the actors. I don't know that anyone is disputing that, given the choice between only Israel and Hamas then Israel is the clear moral authority, but that...

And yet, Hamas is going out of its way to target civilians. And yet your heuristic is still flawed because you identified Israel and Palestine as the actors. I don't know that anyone is disputing that, given the choice between only Israel and Hamas then Israel is the clear moral authority, but that...

It seems like you get wrecked by abrupt decay. I would've said this wasn't an issue several months ago because of Jund being a much smaller percentage of the meta but because twin is winning right now more decks are starting to run abrupt decay, like vanilla pod or lsv's new angel pod. Being on the ...

In a 1998 study that compared people discharged from acute psychiatric inpatient facilities and others in the same neighborhoods, researchers found that “there was no significant difference between the prevalence of violence by patients without symptoms of substance abuse and the prevalence of viol...

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2811%2961851-5/fulltext http://promoteacceptance.samhsa.gov/publications/facts.aspx?printid=1 For that last link, I find these particularly compelling In reviewing the research on violence and mental illness, the Institute of Medicine co...

Autistic people are not incapable of abstract thought, nor are they incapable of recognizing other people's minds. One of the foremost researches on Autism (Simon Baron-Cohen) uses the term "mind blindness" to describe the social interactions of autistic individuals and says that, while t...

I've been running a similar build but with spirit walk, Rain of Toads and the passive the procs fetishes. The duty those fetishes pull is unreal. I have a Tall Man's Finger and Mask of Jeram at 99%. My zombie dog crit regularly for 16mil and my Gargantuan (on cooldown) crits for 30 mil. Fetishes run...

Hey, my local store is doing the same thing!. What do you think of the modern event deck? I personally am very disappointed in the mana base, I mean, what the hell is city of brass doing in a 2 color aggressive deck? You don't have fetchlands and the decks you'd want to run CoB in are aggressive mu...

It's also harder than you might think to kill someone chemically. There's a free program out there that models a rat heart and lets you fiddle with different neurochemical levels. We used it in an undergrad biopsych class to demonstrate how complicated the interactions are. It's harder than you'd ex...

Been running my WD with a Wiz and Monk friend. Running a build based solely around cooldowns. Super Gargantuan, Pirhanado, Fetishes, Dance, Spirit Walk, and then spam bats w/ no mana to channel rune. It works really well because of the passive the reduces cooldowns by 1 second for every enemy killed...

I have a $70 device that would render one of these guns inoperable sitting on a shelf right now. Like literally, ready to go. If this specific technology becomes legally mandated I will make my living stealing these from people. You're stealing from people who can afford to blow 10k on a gun, and t...

You can't bargain but your insurance company can. If you don't have insurance, due to the price war between hospitals and insurance (price quadruples so insurance gets 75% discount), you are screwed. I suggest that discounts be capped at 20%. That is, if an insurance company haggles their cost to $...

Tort "reform" (which typically means making it hard to sue and limiting the amounts recovered) is a pretty poor way to control unnecessary spending (defensive medicine is a part of that.) Regions of the united states can vary by a factor of ten or more in the frequency of important diagno...

Except states that have passed tort reform, like Texas, to help reduce "defensive medicine" have seen a drop in healthcare costs of ~.1%. And the largest estimates I've seen as to the cost of defensive medicine place it around 55 billion dollars, which is 2% of the total national healthcar...

As a person who works in the US with children determined to have a serious emotional disturbance (SED) I can tell you that Lancita has most likely pointed you already to the cause of all of this. Billing. Anyone who has worked in the mental health system knows how obsessive every organization is abo...

I never understood why it had to be a platinum coin. Like, are we worried people are going to create/accept forgeries? Or are we pretending that if we make it out of platinum as opposed to tin, people will more readily accept it? Or was it some arcane legal reason? I really wish the Republican party...

Last night I went drinking, and decided to try a new beer (a habit I'm hoping to keep going for the near future at least). I chose a Vostok Space Beer - a craft stout brewed specifically for increased flavour and decreased carbonation (even compared to regular stouts), with the intention of making ...

Is there any evidence that a chiro is better than a physiotherapist? No. A chiropractor is the same as an acupuncturist insofar as it's ability to evoke the placebo affect is strong. EDIT: This is personally a hot button issue for me; the entire alt med field basically keeps demanding these small p...

There's actually a body of evidence to suggest that chiro can help alleviate lower back pain. My gf goes to a chiro because of back pain, so I looked into it because I was skeptical. That being said, there's 0 reason to send a baby, whose bones are still soft, to a chiro and a lot of chiros go too f...

Some proof that this actually has nothing to do with the budget and everything to do with an electoral minority who is xenophobic enough and feels persecuted enough that any act of governance that they don't like is tyranny. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/13/larry-klayman-obama-quran_n_409458...

Even in super slow formats, you can goldfish a turn 4 win easily. The problem is the consistency of your deck and the consistency of the opposition. There's only one viable sweeper currently but we also got rid of a lot of good red and white cheap cards, so it's currently a format at both ends of th...

I would list them individually personally. A lot of people don't collect duals in lots and you end up eliminating a lot of your market for what is probably a minimal gain. In Theros news: I'm glad control w/o many permanents is a thing now. I realize it's basically just RtR block constructed, but I ...

When you bake the asparagus INTO the cake, people's general aversion to asparagus is not always overcome by their affinity for cake. That's why you can have 25% like asparagus, 85% like cake, and still have only 37% who like asparagus cake. Right, except it's like hating flour and liking cake. The ...

Politically, opposition to the ACA was a fairly large factor in the republicans taking the House in 2010; and given that public support for it is actually declining, they have every reason to expect it to be a factor in 2014, especially as more and more people lose working hours, or lose jobs. You ...

I'd take out Garruks, Nyleas, Elvish Mystics, and Witch Stalkers and put in more aggressive creatures. Smiters, the new watchwolf printed in theros, call of the conclave, Boon Satyr, and Selesnya Charm are all additions to consider. On the other hand, if you want to be more midrange, I'd take out th...

Politically, opposition to the ACA was a fairly large factor in the republicans taking the House in 2010; and given that public support for it is actually declining, they have every reason to expect it to be a factor in 2014, especially as more and more people lose working hours, or lose jobs. You ...

Football is actually relatively unique in the American sports pantheon for this kind of thing not happening. It happens all the time in baseball and basketball. And honestly, if it gets them Bridgewater or Manziel next year, it might be for the best.

Have you ever had sex with your partner when you knew she didn't want to but you thought she should agree because she's your wife/ partner? I'm curious as to how this question was translated for these countries. Does "when you knew she didn't want to" mean that she wasn't consenting? Its ...